Same, same, but deeferent

The illusion of freedom

I managed to avoid watching the exceptionally silly film “The Interview” (2015) starring James Franco until fairly recently. The plot concerns an intrepid US journalist (James Franco) who with his team manages to inveigle his way in to the inner sanctum of Kim Jong Un’s N. Korean palace in order to conduct an interview with the ghastly dictator. I am not going to divert any more resources to laying out the storyline - if you feel like a giggle and have no expectations higher than you would watching an Abbott & Costello movie then give it a go. I watched it because my then teenage children were fans and cornered me one wet November Sunday evening having tried to convince me to watch it with them for the longest time. It was especially important for them because they had taken to quoting quips from the film at every possible opportunity, their favourite being “same, same but deeferent” which they inserted into every conversation, irrespective of context. Here it is, to save you watching the whole thing. The film was also memorable for having apparently really pissed off the real Kim Jong Un who tried to have it shut down by hacking Sony’s servers or something. There should be an Oscar or equivalent for art productions that expose the fragile egos of otherwise hideous psychopathic leaders to ridicule.

I mention this as it popped into my head this last week whilst reading and then rereading Auron MacIntyre’s superb analysis of the current malaise of conservativism and the dire state of the system we refer to as Liberal Democracy. In his book “The Total State - How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies” he has singlehandedly reframed the way I am able to understand our current dilemma. By setting out an accessible and comprehensive heuristic into which much of what I believe to be true along with many aspects of our times which I have struggled either to understand fit comfortably, he has allowed me to a create a reasonably coherent map of the territory.

One of his lynch pin observations comes at the beginning of his thesis where he states

Much of the twentieth century was framed as a battle between two competing political ideologies, liberal democracy versus communism, individual rights on one side and collectivism on the other. But de Jouvenel asserted that the two political systems had the same end goal: the total state. Those in charge naturally look for ways to increase their power, centralizing all duties and loyalties to themselves. This can be done by casting themselves as liberators, freeing the people from the yoke of obligation to their regional powers, or, in the case of competing social spheres, the duty of caring for one’s family or of attending church. A communist regime can also offer liberation from the capitalist class, the competing economic sphere portrayed as a parasite upon the freedom and wellbeing of the worker. Under both the liberal and communist archetypes, the functions that these competing institutions once served are transferred to state-managed bureaucracies."